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Ryan Nugent-Hopkins will be playing the month of December for all those junior hockey players who didn’t get the invite to the Team Canada camp Monday.

And he says he’ll particularly be playing for those who will be getting that dreaded phone call, the one he received before the crack of dawn telling him he wasn’t going to be a member of Team Canada at the World Junior.

Keep your heads up, kids. It may seem like the worst day of your hockey life, but it doesn’t have to be.

“When you get that call … I don’t know how to describe it. You don’t want to get that call,” he said.

“I wanted to make that team so bad.

“But when I went back to my team and those guys went to play in the World Junior, I wanted to make sure it affected me in a positive way.

“My last half of the season was a lot better than my first half,” said the player who made himself the No. 1 pick in the NHL Entry Draft.

On a day when the Hockey Canada people were in the building for a press conference to announce the 41-man contingent to go to camp for the World Junior, it was hard for Nugent-Hopkins to not think about it.

Two months ago, it looked like his name was going to be on top of that list released Monday. It looked for all the world, because he has the frame of a goal post, that the Edmonton Oilers had every intention of sending him back to junior to grow into his body and to get the benefit of the World Junior experience Jordan Eberle and Taylor Hall had before him.

Instead, Monday night he moved into a sixth-place tie in the NHL scoring race with the likes of Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Toews, Nicklas Backstrom and Daniel Sedin, who also have 25 points so far this season.

“That seems kinda surreal to me, to be honest,” he said.

“It’s pretty crazy.”

With an assist on Eberle’s first-period goal in Monday night’s 2-1 loss to the Nashville Predators, Nugent-Hopkins moved into sole possession of first place in Oilers points production, one ahead of Ryan Smith.

With 25 points in 24 games, The Nuge will go into December as a point-per-game player instead of into a camp to audition for a chance to play for Team Canada in the tournament being shared by Edmonton and Canada.

“It would have been a great experience to play for Team Canada this year,” he said. “But this is a better one.”

He’s now eight points ahead of Craig Smith of Nashville in the rookie scoring race and is the only real candidate for the Calder Trophy, the only major individual award an Edmonton Oiler has never won.

There’s plenty of local content on the 41-man group chosen for camp, although Medicine Hat Tigers netminder Tyler Bunz from St. Albert is the only Oilers draft choice in the group. Hardly the same as watching Nugent-Hopkins if it ended up he’d been sent back to the Red Deer Rebels.

Nugent-Hopkins was one of those kids selected for the camp last year. And he was one who got the phone call, the exceptionally early call to his room to tell him he hadn’t made the team and to pack his bags, meet with the media in the hotel lobby and catch his transportation to the lobby and the flight home to rejoin his junior team.

“Size could have been a factor,” he said.

“That was a big, strong team with a lot of grit on it. I had no idea until the phone rang that morning if I was going to be a fit on it or not. It would have been a great experience.”

History will record that Canada, which didn’t win gold, passed on a guy who 11 months later would have the same number of points as Stamkos, Toews, Backstrom and Sedin.

“It’s every kid’s dream to wear that uniform and one day I hope I will,” he said.

But again, later rather than sooner.

If the Oilers play too many more games like the one they played last night, he’ll find himself at the IIHF World Championships this spring in Sweden and Finland.

As Advertised in the Edmonton SUN

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After the odd game or the occasional stretch like the recent Arizona-Arizona-Toronto, 899,447 Edmontonians, and half as many again in surrounding communities, run around shouting ‘The Sky Is Falling! The Sky is Falling!’